May-Lin Eu was about as far away as she could have been from her students at the Learning Center for the Deaf in Framingham.

But as the elementary school teacher toured the Bo Ai School for the Deaf in JiuJiang, China, she said she "felt like I was back home....They had the same class sizes, the same rapport between teachers and students."

On top of those similarities, Bo Ai and the Learning Center for the Deaf are now sister schools, after Eu and Learning Center executive director Judy Vreeland signed an accord between the institutions during a visit to China this month.

The relationship could lead to teacher and student exchange programs, video conferencing and pen pal correspondences, and other efforts to share the schools' unique curriculums.

Eu and Vreeland were members of a delegation to China representing the deaf and deaf education community in Massachusetts. The two-week trip, which included stops in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities, was coordinated by Partners In Excellence, an organization that connects deaf communities in different countries.

Kevin Nolan, who works with Partners In Excellence, led the effort to unite the Learning Center with Bo Ai.

"He really felt like our mission and their mission was very similar, and he wanted to bring us together," Vreeland said.

Vreeland and Eu agreed to the proposal and spent three days in JiuJiang touring the school and taking part in a signing ceremony.

Despite the schools' similarities, Eu and Vreeland were confronted with many communication gaps during their visit to Bo Ai.

Like the countries' spoken languages, the Chinese and American versions of sign language are very different, Vreeland said.

Eu, who is deaf, said she found some elements of Chinese sign language familiar. During the trip she introduced the language to her students by using Skype to teach long-distance lessons each morning.

"We'd quiz the kids and have them try to guess the meaning of the signs," she said.

More often than not, their interpretations would be wrong - sometimes to comical results. The sign for America in Chinese, for example, is the spinning finger motion that most people here would interpret as the sign for crazy.

"It's not derogatory," Eu said. "It's just another use of the sign."

The revelation that another group of kids halfway around the world were learning a completely foreign type of sign language "shocked" her students, she said. "Many kids thought it just existed here."

Being able to show the students that they're not alone in the world was one of the main purposes for the partnership with Bo Ai, Vreeland said. The relationship with their Chinese peers will help the students "connect in terms of deaf culture, and recognize they have this tremendous similarity, while their countries are very different."

The school was founded 10 years ago by He Shenghua and is now run by his son. Like the Learning Center, Bo Ai is a bilingual school - it teaches sign language and spoken and written language. The wide use of both forms of communication by school staff sometimes blurs the lines of who and who isn't deaf; for example, neither Eu or Vreeland could recall whether the director's wife, who principally communicated through sign language, was deaf.

Interpreters helped the visitors overcome language barriers during the trip, and Vreeland said a translator is helping with e-mail correspondence between the schools since their return.

Vreeland said she wants to immediately develop the Learning Center's relationship with Bo Ai. She and Eu are putting together a presentation outlining their plans to be shown to faculty, students and staff.

"The more we're engaged and talking about it, the more our ideas will emerge," she said. "I don't have any doubt we'll keep this going - it was a very powerful experience."